January 06, 2015

We are so excited to start cooking in 2015! But first let's take a quick look back at 2014.

In our ongoing quest to test-drive food magazine recipes, we tried out a lot of dishes last year. Some were good; some were duds. Here are the best things we made all year long, in chronological order. First up are our favorite food magazine recipes, followed by a few other favorites from last year.

The 10 Best Food Magazine Recipes from 2014...

1. Pork and Squash Stew with ChilesTender bites of pork in a savory broth with a warm, comforting heat. It's the perfect dish for winter -- and, as we wrote back in February, an ideal make-ahead dish.

4. Edamame-Miso Tuna Salad SandwichesThis is probably the one dish we've made the most since posting about it last year. The mix of miso, hot chile oil and edamame is a great new spin on tuna salad. We've made this (especially for lunch to take to work) more times than we can count.

5. Ayam Jeruk (Grilled Chicken and Toasted Coconut Salad)We debated whether to include this dish in our year-end roundup, because we'd made so many substitutions in the recipe. But who cares? This dish was to die for, and we're sure it's even better if you can find fresh galangal. And shaved coconut. And candelnuts. And Asian shallots. And Balinese long peppers...

6. Asian Marinated TomatoesThese tomatoes are really more of an accompaniment or a condiment than a stand-alone dish. But they're marvelous. If we may quote our own post from last summer: "Imagine if a bowl of salsa spent a semester abroad in Thailand, and got really into meditation and mystic Buddhism and lemongrass, and then came home and hopped up on your grilled chicken." Who doesn't want that??

7. Spiced Lamb BurgersNothing we made last year was as drool-worthy as these lamb burgers. As we said back in July, "The lamb is flavorful and full of wonderful spice from the coriander, cumin and cinnamon. The fat from the lamb melts into the pitas, soaking them with flavor and making them crispy and amazing." If you're not salivating at that, there may be something wrong with you.

8. Vietnamese Pork Chops with Pickled WatermelonIn August, we solidly declared this the "DISH. OF. THE. SUMMER." We stand by that. This salty/savory/sour/sweet/pungent/crispy/juicy dish is everything you want in a grilled entree.

9. The Barefoot Contessa's Goat Cheese Mashed PotatoesIt's highly possible that no dish we've featured has ever elicited a greater response than these potatoes that we made for our Fakesgiving test-run of recipes. We heard from countless -- countless! -- friends and family and Bitten Word readers who made these for Thanksgiving. And just about everyone has told us these are the best mashed potatoes they've ever made.

November 16, 2014

If a food magazine features an "old-fashioned" or somewhat unknown regional recipe, we're all about it. This is one of the reasons we love Cook's Country -- they consistently surface recipes that are windows into another time or place for us, like the Carolina Sweet Potato Sonker we made a few Thanksgivings ago.

When it comes to Thanksgiving, we're open to some novelty, be it tortilla chips, prunes or even olives. None of these flavors scream Thanksgiving to us, but hey, why not try it?

So we loved the novelty and concept of this Old-Fashioned Cracker Dressing with Dried Cranberries and Pecans.

Of course you can make a dressing with crackers (Goldfish dressing? Cheez-It stuffing?), but should you?

December 04, 2013

If we were building a holiday season survival bunker, we'd fill it with a bunch of chicken breasts.

Sure, we're going to parties, and happy hours, and tree trimmings. We even went to an early Christmas dinner (beef tenderloin! horseradish sauce!) earlier this week with friends.

But when we're not on the holiday circuit, we're eating lean. So there's chicken. Lots and lots of chicken. And brocolli. And sweet potatoes. Boring, but true.

And we are the No. 1 offenders of cooking a boring chicken breast, with a little seasoning, tossed in the oven, and simply baked. It's easy, and tasty enough, but those dishes aren't going to win any awards.

Cook's Country had our number with their "Chicken Baked in Foil" feature, with three takes on chicken that gives you the lightness of chicken breasts, but with amped-up flavor.

We selected Chicken Baked in Foil with Sweet Potato and Radish and got to work.

November 11, 2013

If you're not sure of the difference, here's the deal: Stuffing is cooked inside a bird, while dressing is cooked outside. That's it.

The two of us grew up solidly among "dressing" folk. It's not that we're opposed to cooking stuffing inside a bird (we have tried it), but it just seems fraught with potential problems for the Thanksgiving table. We have enough trouble getting our turkey up to temperature -- we don't need the added concern of whether the stuffing is up to temperature as well.

The dressings we each grew up on, made by our grannies, were dense, moist and cakey (like the one we wrote about in this post). There were no special bells and whistles. They did not have "crispy" bits -- instead, they were just uniformly wet.

But we were intrigued by the idea of a crispy stuffing. And Cook's Country's new method for an extra-crispy one was all the excuse we needed to give it a whirl.

October 28, 2013

Chocolate cake, made from scratch and ready to eat in less than 5 minutes? It's like a wonderful gift you're not sure you can trust to have in your house.

We were equal parts ecstatic and terrified of that recipe. We do not need much of an excuse to treat ourselves. And in the two years since, we've made the cakes a handful of times whenever we've had the ingredients on hand.

That recipe, though, is "good enough." Given how quickly you can go from zero to chocolate cake, we were willing to let go the fact that the cake could be spongy, and dry, and sometimes a bit chewy. It was not great, but for a cake you make in your microwave in a few minutes? Like we said: good enough.

March 27, 2013

Our friends Drew and Ralph -- characters you know doubt recognize from many a dinner featured here on The Bitten Word -- have just opened a restaurant (a second restaurant, technically, that just so happens to be very favorably reviewed in today's Washington Post).

As they've been getting the new eatery up and running, they've been understandably busy, so we haven't been able to hang out as much. To make up for lost time, they invited us to come over to their house for brunch on Sunday.

"What's for brunch?" Clay casually asked Drew a few days beforehand.

"We saw this recipe in the latest Cook's Country that looks awes---,"

"The Really Crunchy French Toast with the Cap'n Crunch?!?!"

The answer: a resounding yes.

We'd spied this recipe when picking out April recipes. We loved the idea, but it seemed a bit of an overindulgence to just make for the two of us.

But when friends invite you over for a French toast feast, you don't turn them down.

And in between we cooked and shared a lot of dishes that we just really loved. It was hard work narrowing it down to only 10 dishes. (If you want more, there's always the Recipe Index, which is fully updated as of today.) But narrow it down we did. Here are our 10 Favorite Food Magazine Recipes of 2012, followed by a bit about each recipe -- plus two bonus dishes, 'cause like we said, narrowing is hard..

[click images to visit the original posts and get the recipes]

Black Eyed Pea Salad from Saveur -- If you didn't get your black eyed peas for good luck yesterday, atone by making this spicy fresh salad.

November 01, 2012

We're only half-joking. Yes, there are three weeks to Thanksgiving, with plenty of time to pull it all together. But if you're hosting a Thanksgiving meal this year, it's also time to start planning.

We try to avoid getting caught up in food hype, but we can't help ourselves at Thanksgiving. We pore through the magazines. We try out a bunch of the dishes. We invite friends over for Fakesgiving (more on this year's event tomorrow).

And each year, we're enamored with the Thanksgiving trends that we see across the spectrum of food magazines we receive. This year, we've closely studied 11 of those magazines, charting their Turkey Day recommendations. As we have in previous years, tomorrow we'll be publishing the 2012 Thanksgiving Index -- a round-up of all the dishes recommended this year by all 11 of those magazines.